Escape from Childhood Quotes

“he said: (1) accept yourself, (2) forget yourself, (3) find something to do and to care about that is more important to you than you are.”
― John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children

“It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere—mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, or pleasure in creating, or sense of self. . . . Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are [they are much the same in most countries], how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and esthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for students as students.”
― John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children

“It is not just power, but impotence, that corrupts people. It gives them the mind and soul of slaves. It makes them indifferent, lazy, cynical, irresponsible, and, above all, stupid.”
― John Holt, Escape from Childhood

“The things we know and believe are a part of us. We feel we have always known them. Almost anything else, anything that doesn’t fit into our structure of knowledge, our mental model of reality, is likely to seem strange, wild, fearful, dangerous and impossible. People defend what they are used to even when it is hurting them.”
― John Holt, Escape from Childhood

“Fantasy works better when it has something real to work with.”
― John C. Holt, Escape from Childhood

“No one can truly say “Yes” to something, be it an experience or another person’s offer of love, if he cannot truly say “No”. No one can wholeheartedly accept and welcome love if he does not have an unquestioned right to refuse it. No one can fully and freely give love if he does not have the unquestioned right to withhold it.”
― John C. Holt, Escape from Childhood

“John, if you ever get a family, there’s one thing you should know. No matter how well you get along with your children when they are little, there is going to come a time when they will have no use for you, and you should be ready for it.”
― John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children

“There is no reason why a child, living in every other way as a dependent of his parents, could not and should not have (like everyone else) the right to decide what he wants to learn and when and how much of it he wants to learn in school, and in what school, and how much time he wants to spend doing it.”
― John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children

“For a very long time, ever since men formed societies in which some people bossed others, children have fulfilled this very important function. Every adult parent, however lowly or powerless, had at least some one that he could command, threaten, and punish. No man was so poor, even a slave, that he could not have these few slaves of his own. Today, when most “free” men feel like slaves, having their own homegrown slaves is very satisfying. Many could not do without them.”
― John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children

“The real test of the quality of life in a nation, as in a community, is how well the poorest people in it live.”
― John C. Holt, Escape from Childhood

“People do not always learn from experience, but without it they do not learn at all.”
― John C. Holt, Escape from Childhood

“If everything is the result of something in the past, nothing has any point.”
― John Holt, Escape from Childhood

“We do not defend furiously what has most real value in our lives; it seems as natural and inevitable as breathing. What we defend most hotly are those things we think we ought to value but secretly know or fear we do not.”
― John Holt, Escape from Childhood

“Every adult parent, however lowly or powerless, had at least some one that he could command, threaten, and punish. No man was so poor, even a slave, that he could not have these few slaves of his own. Today, when most “free” men feel like slaves, having their own homegrown slaves is very satisfying.”
― John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children

“In short, by the institution of childhood I mean all those attitudes and feelings, and also customs and laws, that put a great gulf or barrier between the young and their elders, and the world of their elders; that make it difficult or impossible for young people to make contact with the larger society around them, and, even more, to play any kind of active, responsible, useful part in it; that lock the young into eighteen years or more of subserviency and dependency, and make of them, as I said before, a mixture of expensive nuisance, fragile treasure, slave, and super-pet.”
― John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children